Ads on the web will get better with AMP. Here’s how.

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By Richard Gingras

VP &#8211; News, Google

There are a lot of bad ads on the web today — ads that are slow, janky and don’t necessarily deliver great user experiences when they include annoying pop-ups or cause content to reflow on your screen. The net result: users install ad blockers, making it difficult for publishers to fund the content they’re creating, and hurting advertisers even when they use acceptable ad practices.

The AMP Project announced the open source AMP for Ads initiative in July to address this issue and ensure users have great experiences on the web with both content and ads. The initiative’s goal is to fix the foundation of digital advertising on the web, applying the principles of AMP to advertising and making ads faster, more beautiful and secure.

Since the announcement, AMP Ads has seen a lot of momentum. Publishers across the world like The Washington Post, The Guardian, and USAToday have been testing AMP Ads via DoubleClick for Publishers.

Today, we’re sharing news that underscores the progress on the initiative.

TripleLift brings speed to native ads with AMP Ads

Native advertising platform TripleLift now serves AMP Ads for publishers and advertisers using their services. Time Inc is their first publisher partner testing AMP Ads.

Time Inc’s VP of Digital Revenue Strategy and Operations, Kavata Mbondo says, “AMP ads represent an opportunity to fix key issues with regards to ad experiences on the web. In our tests with TripleLift, AMP ads are already more viewable, up 13% from standard ads on AMP pages. We’ve also seen corresponding improvements in CTRs and eCPMs.”

TripleLift also found that AMP ads load 6x faster and are 3x lighter than comparable standard ads.

TripleLift’s President, Shaun Zacharia says, “As a native advertising platform, we want to make ads seamless with the pages in which they’re served in. Now with AMP for Ads, we get to realize that vision while ensuring we’re delivering the better ad performance our partners are looking for.”

Cloudflare now provides ad verification services for AMP Ads

Unlike standard ads, AMP ads must be verified by an authorized signing service before being served to a page. This is important to ensure both a fast and secure user experience. Signed ads allow AMP to trust that the ads are properly created in AMP format. This allows AMP to coordinate the ad experience alongside other components on the page, for a fast and reliable ad experience.

Cloudflare, a leading performance and security company, announced today an AMP ad verification and optimization service, Firebolt, that improves the ad experience for any 3rd party ad network or publisher. Utilizing Cloudflare’s AMP cache, Firebolt helps to deliver faster, safer, and more efficient ads.

This collaboration with the broader ad tech community is a true testament to the open source nature of the AMP Project.

Not your typical banner ad

One of the key tenets of AMP Ads is to ensure that while it makes user experiences better, it doesn’t throttle the creativity of advertisers and publishers. As you can see from the demo of USA Today’s early tests, you can deliver AMP ads using really creative ad formats. Importantly, more creative functionality is being added by the open source developer community with every passing week.

And that’s not all. We’re also working with agencies and buying platforms to ensure they have the tools they need to both build and deliver these fast AMP ad creatives. Advertising teams at Google are also looking into ways in which they can auto convert ads to AMP creatives so that advertisers can get better marketing performance from faster, better ad experiences.

This is the beginning of an exciting journey but there’s a lot more work ahead and we need to work together to ensure that ads remain the lifeblood of the internet. So get involved, join the AMP for Ads initiative, share your ideas and participate in a new fast, beautiful and open ads ecosystem.